You Need To Feel the Pain

We live in a culture and time in which many have been taught that they should not feel pain. To avoid the pain which comes their way and often in advance, they self-medicate with booze and pot and over-the-counter relaxants. They go to doctors who prescribe sedatives/pain killers/sleep inducers, etc., medication which usually becomes habit forming because the pain of giving it up is called “detox” and is read by the doctor and user as a sign that they need it.

It is a fool’s dance which benefits the doctor who makes his living and the pharmaceutical corporation which sells it to them both, drugs which frequently sickens the user with “side effects” which actually are effects you can pretty much expect.

The underlying issue is knowing what you feel. It is as if the body/mind’s purpose of feeling pain is without value. This is so far from the truth that it can be regarded as suicidal and if not that serious, turning you into a kind of robot which does not react to what is happening to you, by you and around you in the world of people and animals and plants and children and lovers and…These feelings are part of your connection. If you will not allow yourself to feel them, you do not connect.

You are floating on the surface. Without negative sensation, you also miss the positive, since no drug distinguishes good from bad. Not knowing what you feel, you do not know what you are missing. Love is the deepest connector. You need to feel your connection to all things. Integration is the truth of being.

Pain is a jumping off place. Pain moves you to caring and creative effort. Pain alerts you to what is going on and gets you to act upon it. If you live to avoid feeling pain you miss out on deep connection. Your feeling of love is an impulse followed by forgetting and moving onto the next event. Love is essentially superficial, replaceable: this person for that, this experience for that. Nothing matters much to you.